Three bronze flying swords screamed down from the morning clouds and stabbed six inches deep into the white marble courtyard of Taichu Yanjing Tower.
Stone chips sprayed across the red carpet. One jagged shard bounced off the rim of a bubbling copper hotpot, nearly knocking a slice of prime spirit-beef off Lin Mo’s chopsticks.
Lin Mo held his chopsticks steady, blew on the beef, and ate it.
Look at that, Lin Mo thought, chewing calmly. I spend a hundred million Spirit Stones renovating this courtyard, and the mountain locals treat my Italian marble like a dartboard.
Around the twelve outdoor banquet tables, three hundred Taichu executives and security guards paused with their bowls half-raised. Thirty-six custom Golden Rolls-Royce Phantoms sat parked in two gleaming rows behind them, their engines purring for the highway run to Sichuan.
Grandma Chen slammed her soup ladle against the rim of the main cauldron. Her silver hair bristled under her white chef’s cap.
“Who throws scrap iron into people’s soup at seven in the morning?” Grandma Chen barked, shielding six-year-old Little Guo’er behind her apron. “If dirt gets in the broth, you’re washing every pot in the kitchen!”
Little Guo’er peeked out from behind her grandmother’s waist, clutching her red porcelain mortar. “Grandma, that man in the sky has a very ugly black cloud over his head.”
